Blame Game Begins As Cuccinelli Fights Off Stench of Impending Doom

As noted over and over again, those opposed to the extreme GOP slate of Ken Cuccinelli, "Bishop" Jackson, and Mark Obenshain cannot get complacent.  All of us need to get out and vote on November 5th so that the hoped for GOP defeat will be as crushing as possible.  Meanwhile, it is sweet to read articles and columns already finding Cuccinelli DOA on election day.  Two in Politico are instructive.  The first Politico piece looks at the sense of doom surrounding Ken Cuccinelli's campaign.  Here are excerpts:

SPOTSYLVANIA, Va.—In politics, it is generally not a good omen when a candidate’s supporters argue that he still has a chance of victory — if the opponent’s supporters neglect to vote.

But this was Virginia Republican Chairman Pat Mullins’s version of the power of positive thinking in an interview this weekend. The path for star-crossed GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, Mullins said, looks like this: “If turnout is in the 30s, the low 30s, we’re gonna win. If it gets higher up in Fairfax [in Democratic-leaning Northern Virginia], say like 40, it’s likely we won’t. I don’t think it’s going to hit 40 anywhere. I’m looking at 32.”

This valiant effort at optimism is the kind of thing a campaign does in the closing hours when it becomes enveloped with an unmistakable stench of impending doom.

Listen to the talking points from the Cuccinelli campaign and its surrogates, and watch their decisions over time and money, and all the signatures of a classic political death march are on bright display.

And the same depressing polls Cuccinelli publicly dismisses have driven the candidate’s decisions. His strategy for the past couple weeks has been the equivalent of hospice care for a very sick patient. Real efforts at getting well — such as trying to persuade swing voters in the vote-rich Northern Virginia suburbs— have been all but abandoned. The alternative is palliative care, trying to ease the pain and wait for a miracle by focusing the candidate’s time and message on stimulating turnout among the conservative base that is already with him.

While Cuccinelli tries to keep his campaign on life support, many people who were never enthusiastic about nominating a zealous social conservative in an increasingly moderate state have been working for weeks on their unflattering obituaries.

 A second Politico article looks at the blame game that has already begun.   Sadly, the entity most responsible for nominating an extreme, horrific slate of candidates goes unnamed:  The Family Foundation.  The Cuccinelli-Jackson-Obenshain ticket is the dream ticket of the religious fanatics and hate merchants at The Family Foundation.  If the ticket goes down to defeat, that defeat needs to be hung directly around the neck of The Family Foundation.  Here are article highlights:

National Republicans agree on this much about the 2013 campaign in Virginia: It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

Well before the last votes are cast in the state’s off-year governor’s race, GOP leaders are already engaged in a spirited debate over why, exactly, a fight against a Democrat as flawed as Terry McAuliffe has turned into such a painful slog of a campaign.

The clearest battle lines will emerge after Tuesday; but the Washington community has groused for months about Cuccinelli’s history of incendiary, ultra-ideological stances, while rank-and-file activists have watched with horror as well-tailored GOP donors have defected to McAuliffe.

A Cuccinelli defeat, in other words, would have a thousand fathers. But this much is already clear: the GOP’s accumulated problems in Virginia have brought the party to the edge of a historic defeat in a nationally pivotal swing state, potentially producing a Republican shutout of all five statewide offices (governor, attorney general, lieutenant governor and two U.S. senators) for the first time since the Nixon administration.

Republican Governors Association executive director Phil Cox, whose group has spent nearly $8 million boosting Cuccinelli, firmly rejected the idea that the Virginia race reflected any limitations of conservative ideas. But he allowed that there may be lessons to learn about how you go about delivering a conservative message.

One Republican donor who has watched the Virginia race closely said the conclusion was even simpler: “You can’t win with a hard-right candidacy.”

“There’s just a lot of people that don’t like [Cuccinelli’s] harsh tone and don’t want to give him money,” the donor said. “He doesn’t do a great job with donors and he doesn’t have a great organization and a lot of people were turned off from the get-go.”

To GOP elites, the likely outcomes in Tuesday’s two gubernatorial elections looks like an instructive contrast: in Virginia, where the party nominated an uncompromising ideologue, Republicans face seemingly likely defeat; in New Jersey, where they have maverick Gov. Chris Christie at the top of the ticket, the GOP will hold the governorship easily. Virginia strikes party elites as a particularly clear example of the base getting its way: . . . . paying little heed to questions of electability, and look where they are now.

Conservatives in Virginia and nationally recoil from the idea that the problem with Cuccinelli’s race is ideology – that Republicans might have been better off nominating a more moderate candidate, or one who could more convincingly argue that he had spent his career focused on broad-spectrum issues like jobs.

Cuccinelli has labored hard to convince voters that he would be the stronger governor on economic development, thanks to his deep understanding of state government and penchant for cutting taxes. Voters don’t seem to be buying it: polls show that a majority of voters have an unfavorable view of the former Fairfax state legislator . . . .

Senior Virginia Republicans react with the equivalent of a deep sigh to conservative claims that Cuccinelli wasn’t proud enough of his own record as an ideological warrior – a tough sell for those who knew him in the state Senate – or that it was a fickle donor class that made the difference in the race. Cuccinelli has had many chances this year to moderate his social views; when challenged, he has reliably stood by his long-stated principles.

I hope Cuccinelli loses badly and that at some point focus will be on the organization that orchestrated the disaster: The Family Foundation, a true pestilence that threatens Virginia's future.